Why shmups are hard

[agony]

well I found this Article and it points to a nice Optical Illusion, found here and well it works (of course it does)

and the colors, looks like a CAVE bullet meeting :]

[landshark]

That is evil. (the illusion)

[professor ganson]

My view about how this illusion works is this. The cone-shaped cells in your retina which are sensitive to colors (as distinct from the rod-shaped ones which are sensitive only to light-dark) are packed at the center of the retina, so that your periperhal vision is not so good with respect to color. That's all that is going on in this particular illusion, it seems to me. Your vision of the colors at the periphery fade as you focus in on the black dot just because the light from the colored areas does not get focused onto your color-sensitive, cone-shaped cells.

Provided that you don't focus in too narrowly on the playfield when playing shmups, you shouldn't run into trouble. This illusion works only because both eyes are focused for an extended time on a single point.

I'm glad I finally found time to follow your links, agony. That is a very cool illusion.

[frenzon]

Those colours are the sorts of colours you'd see after staring at bright objects and then looking at something dark, so I'd have thought that the brain would be naturally good at filtering those colours (esp since our eyes send pretty dirty signals, so the brain spends a tonne of time doing this kind of thing).

[professor ganson]

I'd have thought that the brain would be naturally good at filtering those colours

Yeah, see, the problem here isn't with the brain; the explanation of the illusion lies in the physiology of the retina. If our color-sensitive nerves were more evenly distributed across the retina, then this illusion would not occur. But as things are the cone-shaped cells are packed in the center of the retina, and for this reason our peripheral vision is more or less useless for color vision.
There is a further question: Why isn't this fact about our peripheral vision more obvious in everyday experience? Why do we need an illusion like this to bring this fact to the attention? The explanation here is just that our visual attention is typically focused precisely on what the eyes are focused on, not on what is in the periphery.

[Tomtom]

That was so cool. I don't understand how it applies to shooters, but hey.

Also, I like your sig, professor ganson. Makes we want to pull out The Soft Bulletin.

[professor ganson]

Also, I like your sig, professor ganson. Makes we want to pull out The Soft Bulletin.

Thanks, Tomtom. I love that album.